Final countdown

There is something beautiful in the brutality of High Down, on the Isle of Wight. Decaying concrete structures squat on the cliff top of the Needles headland, and rusted spikes of metal jut out of the land like broken bones. I ask Jim Scragg, a 77-year-old rocket scientist who worked here 50 years ago at the High Down Test Site, how he feels about coming back. "It brings back a lot of good memories," he says. "It was very exciting. We were proving ourselves to the world."

This is where Britain's space rockets were tested in the middle of the last century. Guards and their alsatians patrolled the perimeter of the site, and watched the sea for Russian spies masquerading as fishermen. This was all kept largely secret from the islanders, unaware of the underground control rooms, and the 10-metre high rockets encased in metal towers built into the cliff face. The rockets, code-named Black Knight, were developed to deliver nuclear missiles, and the testing must have looked very dramatic - 3,000 gallons of water a minute were pumped in to cool the engines, causing plumes of steam to billow from the cliffside.

In 1965, the team started to develop Black Arrow, a rocket to launch a satellite into space. In October 1971, High Down launched Prospero, the first and only British satellite to be launched by a British rocket, from a base in Australia. But the government suddenly announced, out of the blue that they were pulling the funding for the High Down lab (there were conspiracy theories about deals done, not least because the funding was diverted to develop Concorde). "Of course we were disappointed," says Scragg. "Our rocket people were among the best in the world. We had the ability, if not the money, to create the sort of rockets America was making." Today, all that is left of Britain's space ambitions on this beautiful spot are a few lumps of concrete, an underground bunker which houses a small exhibition with photographs and models of the missiles, and the memories of some of the 200 people who worked there.